The 1967 Spring Joint Computer Conference session organized by Willis Ware and the 1970 Ware Report are widely held by computer security practitioners and historians to have defined the field's origin. This article documents, describes, and assesses new evidence about two early multilevel access, time-sharing systems, SDC's Q-32 and NSA's RYE, and outlines its security-related consequences for bot...
View full abstract»

Before Symantec became a major supplier of security software, it offered a variety of natural language microcomputer software products. Its growth into a security firm was the result of acquisitions of software enterprises and expanding market conditions in the 1980s and 1990s. This story tells not only about nimbleness in the early software industry, but also about the importance of venture capit...
View full abstract»

As part of a broader prehistory and history of early intrusion-detection systems (IDSs), this article focuses on the first such system, Intrusion Detection Expert System (IDES), which was developed in the second half of the 1980s at SRI International (and SRI's follow-on Next Generation Intrusion Detection Expert System, or NIDES, in the early-to-mid 1990s). It also briefly recounts other early ID...
View full abstract»

Developed around 1973 by BBN under contract from DARPA, the private line interface (PLI), a cryptographic cybersecurity device used on the Arpanet, operated with minimal modification of the existing network infrastructure, sitting at the "edge" of the network between the network switches and the connected host computers. As a result of the developmental and infrastructural trajectory set in motion...
View full abstract»

Digital pictures and computers are now inseparable, so it's surprising how generally unremarked their association was in the beginning. Records reveal that the first digital pictures--the first still pictures, videogames, and computer animations--were made on the earliest computers. Historians have noted this before, but individually without a unifying context. This article shows that the original...
View full abstract»